In 726 the Byzantine emperor Leo III began a war against icons. He was moved, it seemed, by a pious feeling — fear of idolatry, a desire to cleanse the faith of the worship of handmade images. But in this zeal a subtle substitution took place: the very fear of the idol became an idol itself. In the holy icon people forgot how to see a window onto the prototype and saw only a thing, a board with paint, to be destroyed. Fighting an imagined paganism, the iconoclasts fell into a paganism of their own — they made a god of the prohibition.
The catastrophe stretched over a full hundred years. Persecutions began against the venerators of icons — monks and laypeople alike; across the empire images were destroyed, frescoes plastered over, and icon covers melted down. The first wave subsided for a time under the empress Irene, but in 815 Leo V the Armenian unleashed a second. Society was split in two for more than a century: some defended the images at the cost of exile and mutilation, while others destroyed them with equal passion. The precious tradition of Christian art was under assault.
A captivity of the spirit set in under the yoke of a state ideology. Church and culture were subjected to a doctrine imposed from above; the living tradition of venerating images went underground, preserved in distant monasteries and on the frontiers, far from the imperial court. Faith became the hostage of political will, and beauty fell under suspicion as a temptation.
The return came twice. First, the Seventh Ecumenical Council at Nicaea in 787 gave the precise formula: the icon is not an idol, for the honor rendered to the image ascends to the One depicted upon it; one venerates not the board but the Prototype. And the dispute was finally extinguished in 843, when the empress Theodora restored the veneration of icons forever — an event the Church still celebrates to this day as the Triumph of Orthodoxy. So the law of history was fulfilled to the end: fear that had become an idol was cast down, and the image returned vindicated. Yet the same dispute over "the thing and the sacred" would flare up again — in the iconoclastic wave of the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation.